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Warm welcome back for snowy Pluto

Of all the revelations that will emerge from one of the most significant days in the history of space exploration, one may stick in the public’s imagination more than any other: it snows on Pluto.

At 12.49pm yesterday Nasa’s New Horizons probe, no larger than a golf buggy, hurtled past the ninth rock from the Sun, completing mankind’s map of the largest objects in the solar system and bringing calls at the highest levels for Pluto to be made a planet again.

As the mission headquarters in Maryland exploded with cheers, applause and a loud roar of glam rock, Major-general Charles Bolden, the head of the space agency, greeted the news with an appeal for the world to be brought back into the ranks of…